Doctor Who Unbound - Negation of Skynet
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese have been chased by the Terminator across the city, leaving destruction in their wake as they try to stay alive. But the arrival of a mysterious stranger prevents a long temporal war. (Full Fathom Five universe)


Disclaimer - I don't own either Doctor Who or Terminator, so I don't get anything in return.

This version of the Doctor is an alternative version, who was portrayed by David Collings in the Unbound audio drama 'Full Fathom Five.' In this Big Finish drama, the Doctor believed the ends justified the means, and he was more than willing to commit the murder of people if they justified it and didn't learn from their mistakes.

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Negation of Skynet.

Sarah screamed as the truck flipped through the air, reminding her of those high-speed car chases from the James Bond movies as a result of trying to finally get rid of the Terminator that had been stalking her for the last couple of days, and she concluded the movies were crap as the truck flipped over before coming to a stop while she and Kyle were trapped inside it because in the real world, when trucks flipped through the air they didn't get out unscathed.

She dimly heard the sounds of smashing and crunching glass and grinding metal underneath the weight of the truck before it thankfully came to a stop.

Sarah took a deep breath and quickly did a mental check. She felt fine, which was more than could be said for Kyle who was in the seat next to her, his eyes squeezed shut in pain. She still wasn't sure what had happened to him; she had been driving on adrenaline while she had been trying to keep some distance between their truck and the motorcycle the Terminator had been riding while shooting at them with that machine gun, but she guessed he had been lighting one of those explosives and the Terminator had shot him and it blew in his face.

"Kyle..?" she said as she undid her seatbelt, thankful it had saved her life, and she swore if she ever got out of this alive then she would definitely have a gun for protection, a dog for an early warning system, and a very good seatbelt.

If she got out of this mess, she considered to herself darkly as she crawled slowly towards Kyle, remembering what the guerrilla fighter from the future had told her about pain before they'd had sex in the motel. She disconnected herself from the pain, though it was hard because she didn't have Kyle's experience.

As she checked him over she could see he was in a bad way, but as she thought through her options she wasn't sure where they could go from here with the Terminator so close…

While she crawled over the seat painfully, Sarah took a moment to think. Ever since this whole mess had begun - the murders of those women who'd shared her name, the shootout at that club where Kyle had attacked the Terminator as it zeroed in on her, Sarah had been living in the Twilight Zone; it was hard to accept anything was real when you found out you were being hunted by an unstoppable killing machine from the future, who wanted to kill her because her unborn son would grow up to become a future military leader who would be trying to stop the Machines from the future from wiping out the human race!

Time travel… It was all too much for Sarah to take in, and the story Kyle had told in the police station had made him out to be a lunatic like Dr Silberman had described, and Kyle's own frustration during that never-ending questioning hadn't helped before the Terminator had attacked. Sarah had no idea how many police officers had died during that mess, but she guessed a lot of them had while she and Kyle escaped.

All to kill her unborn son.

Idly Sarah thought about what her friend and co-worker at Big Jeff's said when that little brat who'd dropped ice cream in her apron the other day; _**"Look at it this way; in a hundred years, who's gonna care?"**_

_No-one, that's who, _Sarah thought to herself darkly as she remembered that nightmare she'd pictured the human race would live in in the future. It was a far cry from sci-fi shows like _Star Trek _where the future is depicted as a utopia where humans were zipping across space, encountering new worlds, new civilisations, boldly going where no-one had gone before.

No, the human race would be reduced to the level of _cavemen_ while they tried to survive in bombed-out ruins, barely able to survive as the machines hunted them down.

As she got closer to Kyle and despite the seriousness of where they were now though she had thought about it briefly when she and Kyle had put their clothes back on before they heard that dog barking and they escaped by going through the back window, Sarah dimly wondered if she was pregnant now after the tryst she'd had with him. It hadn't taken her long to discover she was attracted to Kyle, but she did wonder if she was fulfilling some kind of temporal paradox…

Sarah's musings were cut short when she had reached Kyle and looked out through the window, just in time to see the Terminator lift its head… only to be smashed by an oil-tanker. Sarah winced at the force of the impact which would definitely kill an ordinary human like her, and she watched as the tanker drove over the Terminator before braking hard to a stop.

Sarah pushed it out of her mind so she could get Kyle out of the truck, but as she was getting her arms underneath him, she watched in horror as a familiar large figure crawled out awkwardly from behind the tanker just as the door to the cab opened and a man wearing a baseball cap jumped out.

Sarah wanted to yell at the man to get away, to get back into the cab and drive off, but she knew it was too late as she watched numbly as the man ran down the length of his tanker and checked it over before the Terminator grabbed him.

Sarah watched in terror as the Terminator threw the man's body to the ground - there was no doubt in her mind the man could very well be dead; after the way he had slaughtered virtually an entire police station, the death of a tanker driver was nothing major.

_Hold on, _she thought to herself as she watched the Terminator head to the cab, _is he…limping? _

She looked closer, studying his gait as he moved towards the cab slowly. Yeah, he was limping! The crash must have done a lot more damage than she'd expected, and she watched numbly as the Terminator climbed into the cab and closed the door. A few minutes later, the engine started and the tanker slowly began to move, turning towards them.

The sight jolted Sarah out of her shock at just how much the Terminator could take, and she doubled her effects to pull Kyle free of the truck.

"Kyle. Come on. Get up!" she told the injured man as she pulled desperately as the tanker was finishing its turn to head in their direction and smash them to pieces. "He's coming!" she said to try to motivate Kyle into snapping back into the real world, and she wondered just how much pain he could actually push aside like it was nothing.

Somehow Sarah managed to get the door open, but she was forced to drag Kyle's weight out through the door. "Come on!" she kept urging her lover to stand on his own feet again.

As she looked over the truck, she could see the oil tanker bearing down on them. "Help me!" she shouted at Kyle. "Get out. Get out!"

The urging managed to spur Kyle into action, and he twisted on himself so she could use the ground to push himself up on one leg even though he was still in a terrible way, but they both managed to get out and away from the truck they'd taken from that man from the Motel. Sarah was relieved when Kyle managed to get back on his feet, but she realised he was forced to limp and run as well, and he had to lean on her to get away, but she didn't have the time to think about it as the oil tanker smashed into the truck and sending it further down the road.

While she was helping Kyle run, she dimly heard the sound of brakes being thrown on the tanker but she didn't pay it any heed while she and Kyle ran for their lives over the bridge.

Sarah was relieved when Kyle became a bit stronger - sure, he was still limping, but he could still move fast - so he took some more of his weight off of her, allowing her to cast a quick glance behind to see the tanker quickly gaining on them. Sarah kept going while holding onto Kyle, afraid if she let go then they'd both die.

"_It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned it. It doesn't feel pity, remorse, or fear. And it WILL NOT stop! Ever! Until you are dead!"_

Kyle was right, Sarah thought idly as she ran his earlier words when she had tried to escape from him in the parking lot when this whole mess happened.

While she still held onto Kyle to support him as he ran, the two turned a corner - Sarah honestly had no idea where about in the city they were, but she didn't care; her survival instincts were going full blast as they both tried to escape the Terminator, but the turning was too much for Kyle as he collapsed by a dumpster in pain

"Don't stop! Run!" Kyle ordered, pushing her away before she could do anything; Sarah hated leaving Kyle behind, but she could hear the engines of the tanker behind her, and even if she could disobey Kyle and help him back up, it wouldn't take much for the Terminator to find some way of carrying out its mission to kill her, and besides she felt she knew Kyle well enough by now to know he had something up his sleeve…

Sarah didn't bother to turn around to see the tanker; the engine noise was so loud she didn't need to see where it was, and besides, she didn't want to look back and lose her momentum. Sarah had never been pushed to run this fast in her life; athletics at school was one thing, but she had never expected to be chased by a cyborg before...

As she ran across the sidewalk Sarah listened with horror at the sound of something heavy bashing into concrete, and the sound of the engine was directly behind her. The Terminator was going to try to run her over, and since she could hear the sound of the tanker the machine was driving behind her draw closer she didn't see any way of getting out of this, but she saw a parked car on the kerb, and she ran around its front.

Sarah was dimly relieved she had put some distance between herself and the tanker once more, but she knew it wouldn't last long. She turned her head, and she saw the tanker drive right through the car, crushing its rear to pieces.

Still hyped up on adrenaline as her survival instinct was going into overdrive, Sarah just kept running, trying to desperately squeeze every last drop of energy she had into moving more quickly, hoping to find some way of getting clear of the Terminator and escaping from this nightmare…But it was no use, she could still hear the tanker behind her.

That was when she heard another sound, a strange wheezing, groaning sound from somewhere in front of her, but she couldn't find the source of it; the tanker was now so close behind her she pushed all thought of what the sound could be out of her mind-

Suddenly there was a massive explosion, and Sarah could feel the scorching heat on her back before she thudded into a wall, and spun around on the spot, watching through wide eyes as the tanker exploded in a great ball of fire, and she distinctly smelt the stench of burning oil in the air. The force of the blast and the heat sent Sarah sprawling to the ground, and she watched in satisfaction and dim delight as she saw the cab go up in flames until she couldn't see anything before she gave in to her exhaustion and clung to the wall, and shook.

Leaning against the wall, shaking and panting with the exertion of running so hard and so far without taking a breather, Sarah finally lifted her head and looked at the burning remnants of the tanker. _Is it over? _she wondered to herself, watching the wreckage closely for any sign of the Termin- NO! NO WAY, PLEASE!

From the burning remains of the cab, Sarah watched in horror as a dark figure jumped out wreathed in flames. She watched as the Terminator fell behind another pile of wreckage before standing up stiffly again and walked a short distance before collapsing on the ground.

_Is it…dead? Shutting down, what? _Sarah thought to herself numbly as she couldn't help but fail in getting the image of that dark-clad figure who had been following her for the past few days, chasing her, trying to kill her, and ploughing through everyone who got in its way. Sarah couldn't see what was happening to the Terminator, the heat of the flames was too much, and if she were honest she didn't even want to know but she hoped the Terminator was being destroyed, though she doubted it; after all it had gone through, Sarah doubted nothing short of a nuke could destroy it.

All she wanted to know was if she needed to keep running, and she closed her eyes at the thought. She was so worn out by everything which had happened, she could barely think straight anymore.

After a few minutes of getting some semblance of her strength back though she wanted nothing more than to collapse on a nice soft bed and sleep, Sarah got back up again and walked slowly back towards the tanker, wincing at the heat she was getting from the flames while she looked for any sign of the Terminator, but the machine seemed to have disappeared…

"Sarah."

Sarah looked around and found herself staring at the distant image of Kyle who was not far away.

"Kyle," she tried to yell back, but she was too exhausted so she had to settle on a hoarse cry. She ran towards him, though even her best effort to squeeze a bit more speed out of her legs failed, so she had to do a quick-walk to him before she wrapped her arms around him and shook again "Kyle," she repeated his name and then again as the pair of them dropped to their knees in exhaustion.

Sarah pulled away slightly to look him in the eye. "We did it, Kyle. We got him."

Sarah virtually collapsed into Kyle's arms as she shook from exhaustion, but her mind was only slightly clear. The pair of them would leave the city together, but after that, she had no idea of what they could do, her mind was too fogged to focus….

A metallic screeching noise caught her attention, causing her to stiffen in horror, and she felt Kyle turn his head around to see if it was what they both thought it was. Sarah quickly turned her head, moving past Kyle to focus on the sight of the Terminator. The machine's organic appearance was gone, melted off during the heat, but while she took in some of the machine's appearance, her eyes couldn't help but stay focused on the red eyes set into its face...

"No," Sarah shouted, suddenly more angry than she had been since this nightmare had begun.

After everything the machine had done; killing two of her friends, destroying her ideas of what the future held, her hopes and dreams of a normal life, forcing her to go on the run while trying to survive being shot at or run down, the fucking thing was still moving-!

Sarah dimly felt Kyle try to urge her to stand, but before she was fully back on her feet a bolt of blue light hit the Terminator in the side, and the machine went still as it slowly started to disappear before it was finally gone.

"Kyle, what happened? Where did it go?" Sarah asked rapidly, wondering if this was some kind of trick.

But Kyle stared at the spot where the Terminator had been, gazing at it with confusion. "I…I dunno," he whispered, and she saw he was as taken aback as she was.

Another man's voice spoke up. "Looks like I acted at the right time."

Kyle and Sarah jumped to their feet, well as best as they could considering Kyle's injuries, and they found they were no longer alone. A man was striding towards them from behind what was left of the cab. Sarah felt Kyle stiffen as protectively as he could, but Sarah ignored him as she studied this stranger.

He was a man of medium height, darkish hair though because of the gloom and the light of the remaining fires it was virtually impossible for Sarah to tell exactly what colour it was, and he had a weathered face indicating he had seen a great deal in his life while going through a great deal as well. The man wore dark clothes, a dark jacket Sarah was pretty sure was made out of velvet, a dark shirt with a bow tie, and dark trousers. But when she spotted the device he was holding in his hand, Sarah stiffened when she caught sight of the familiar butt of a rifle, though this one with its larger circular bore reminded Sarah more of a torch.

"Who are you?" Kyle snapped protectively, breaking through her thoughts.

The man spared a sympathetic look towards Kyle and Sarah, however, Sarah could sense some kind of edge to the look as though expressing sympathy was not something which came easily to him...

"I am the Doctor," the man replied, lifting the weapon he was holding in his arms. "I just saved you from that Terminator," he said mildly as though the matter was hardly relevant anymore

"You did that?" Sarah whispered, partly surprised the man, the Doctor, even knew about the Terminators. The contrast between the Doctor and his appearance and this whole mess made it just seem even more bizarre. But her reply was more than a little mocking; after everything she had been through, the destruction was she unwillingly a part of, where the hell was he?

The Doctor didn't seem bothered by her response. "I did. I have also made sure the Terminator's timeline is completely shut off by using this," he lifted up the odd device in his hand.

Kyle nodded at it. "What is that thing?"

"It's a Transmat gun; it breaks targets down and reassembles them again at the other end over long distances," the Doctor replied.

"Hold on, a Transmat gun?" Sarah repeated, holding up a hand to stop him from going on while she got things thought through in her head. "That sounds like something from _Star Trek."_

The Doctor chuckled.

"You're thinking of the Transporters. The technology is actually more basic than that, but that's the best analogy. I sent the Terminator into the core of the Earth; it's the only inaccessible place nearby I could think of. The Terminator may be fully armoured and difficult to fight, much like a Dalek, but they can't resist the intense pressures and heat of the core of the Earth," the Doctor commented, still chuckling as he looked between Sarah and Kyle. "But now the Terminator and Skynet's timeline is negated, you will both have the chance to see the future unfold in a different path than Skynet appearing as a certainty."

"Who are you, some kind of time traveller?" Sarah asked, no longer mocking as she had been before. Now she was serious, though she tried to imagine how long the Terminator had in the centre of the Earth before it was destroyed. She idly wondered what a 'Dalek' was, but she found she didn't really care that much.

The Doctor regarded her silently for a moment and nodded solemnly as though he was weighed down by some tremendous weight than was even heavier than the one Sarah had thrust over her own shoulders, as the mother of the child who would be the saviour in a nightmarish future where the human race was holding on by _threads. _"Yes," the Doctor replied.

"Did John send you back?" Kyle asked desperately. "Did he find a point where the Terminators could really be stopped?"

Sarah stared between the two men for a moment, realising that after the Terminator and Kyle had been sent back through time, it was possible for her future child to find some way to end all of this. But the Doctor shook his head.

"No. The time travel technology Skynet uses might be effective, but its a very unstable method; the potential to create timelines is too great, which is even more hazardous considering how Skynet's existence is basically a loop. No, I am not from Earth. I am actually what's called a Time Lord. My people have had access to time travel for a long time, and I used that technology when I was conducting research into…another matter," the Doctor paused over that part of his explanation though he refused to go into depth about what that _"other matter" _was, and Sarah wondered what he meant while she found herself not the slightest bit stunned by what he had said as he went on, "and detected the time loop where Skynet would be created, send a Terminator back through time, and be responsible for the creation of Skynet in the first place."

"You mean… the Terminator wasn't just responsible for nearly killing Sarah, but it would build Skynet?" Kyle asked in surprise while Sarah was still lost in thought.

"Not quite. You and Miss Connor here would always have defeated the Terminator. But the remains of the android would have survived for study, and without the computer chip, Cyberdyne would never recreate the microchip which would eventually lead to Skynet's creation, ending this paradoxical little time loop. I've witnessed too many cases of alternate timelines becoming a reality over the years, and Skynet was a possibility I could not risk."

Meanwhile, Sarah was too busy thinking about what she had learnt about this mysterious Doctor.

The Doctor was an _alien, a real-life __**fucking **__alien!_

The Doctor had a time machine!

The Doctor had stopped Skynet from starting, right?

But something occurred to Sarah at that moment. "Hold on, why have you waited until now to stop the Terminator when you could have ended it before it all happened?" she asked, trying hard to keep the rising tide of anger out of her voice.

The Doctor sighed and looked at her solemnly. "I'm sorry, Miss Connor," he said apologetically though Sarah didn't know if he was truly acting speaking in a sincere manner, "but you needed to be aware of what could potentially arise. And besides, even if Skynet isn't created, the unborn child you're now carrying can still go on to do great things."

Sarah was not sure how to take that remark; on the one hand she felt the reply was a bit too pat, too Machiavellian for her tastes, but on the other, as she came to think about it in more detail, she had to accept knowing about what was potentially out there was better than not, though she wasn't sure if that was a good thing than a bad thing…

But…

She was pregnant. She was pregnant with Kyle's baby?

"What happens now?" Kyle whispered, and Sarah looked at him while making up her mind to find a pregnancy test as soon as she could, hearing the loss in his voice. For a moment she wondered why he felt so lost, and then she realised, much to her chagrin, that Kyle had spent his entire life running and hiding and fighting, and now that he was in the past without anywhere else to go, and that the thing he had been sent to deal with was now gone and that Skynet itself would never appear, Kyle was more lost than ever.

The Doctor shrugged his shoulder unhelpfully. "Live your lives to the full," he advised them both simply, "raise your son together. Just be thankful Skynet's gone."

"Are you sure about that, Doctor?" Sarah asked, using the man's 'name' if you could call a title that pointedly as she looked around the scene of destruction around them. "I mean, we've been seeing the Terminator get up time and again-."

"Skynet's creation depended on the creation of the microchip technology derived from the remains of the Terminator. Don't worry. Skynet and the Terminators are gone. Good luck with your new lives," the Doctor said at last, and he turned around and walked away.

Sarah wanted to run after him, t*o get some more answers from him instead of riddles, but as she shifted she paused; now the crisis was over and the Terminator was gone, her adrenaline enhanced legs didn't wish to move, and one look at Kyle told her he was just as exhausted as she was while the Doctor disappeared.

A few minutes later, Sarah's ears pricked up again when she heard that wheezing groaning noise that she heard before when the Terminator had been chasing her, and she realised she had heard the Doctor's time machine leave.

"He's gone," she said simply; it was a stupid thing to say, but it was all she could say for the time being. She turned and kissed Kyle lovingly on the lips, and she grinned into his mouth as he kissed back before they pulled away.

"What happens now?" Kyle asked.

Sarah pondered the question for a moment before she shrugged. "I dunno," she replied honestly, finding it hard to think in the long term. For the short, however… She and Kyle would need to get to a hospital, get as far from here as possible, and she would have to think of some way to give Kyle some ID papers for this time so he could live here, but those were problems for another time.

_Time, _she thought to herself darkly, _we've got plenty of time, but what else does it hold?_

* * *

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor was studying the new timeline which had been created now the Terminator had been destroyed on the screen. The time loop representing the paradoxical little timeline where Skynet would create itself by sending a Terminator back through time to kill Sarah Connor and fight humanity over and over again was certainly gone. It had broken off from the main events in the Time Vortex, so while its possibility to exist was still there, it would never exist in reality.

The Doctor nodded with satisfaction, but his eyes never left the scanner screen as he narrowed them. Once more he cursed his previous lives before they realised that sometimes you had to go deeper and use more extreme methods to prevent things from getting out of control.

Most of the technology Skynet was derived from was based on the technology of the Cybermen, much like RoboCop, but the two events were not really connected beside the integration of Cyber-based technology, but the potential was still there.

The events in Detroit would happen much further in the future, quite close to the time where Skynet itself would have existed, so there was no real reason for the Doctor to do anything to OCP, or to Alex Murphy. The cybernetics that went into Murphy's body was what typified the Cybermen; full augmentation of an organic body, not computer-based systems like Skynet.

The Doctor checked the timelines again and he saw there was no real reason to be concerned though he was tempted to destroy Cyberdyne Systems to make absolutely certain Skynet was not created; just because the CPU from the Terminator he had just dealt with as it cornered Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor had been destroyed, did not mean something similar couldn't be created, leading to the exact events he was trying to avoid. The fact that, even now, so many human companies and organisations were, at the behest of their governments, trying to study technology derived from the Cybermen even though they probably didn't know where the materials came from though it didn't really matter since human ingenuity won out and created new applications for it.

The Doctor frowned and he typed in to check what would happen if Cyberdyne was taken out of the equation and Miles Dyson disappeared. It took a while for the TARDIS to come back with the possibilities; on the one hand the loss of someone as inventive as Dyson would certainly slow the development of the microchip technology down, though in the future another research unit dubbed Cyber Research Systems would arise in the future in the age where the internet was commonplace, which offered the potential for Skynet to become even more serious, and yet as he scanned the timelines the Doctor could not see any sign of the Skynet which had developed the Terminators and devised a method of sending them back through time to hunt specific people who would threaten its existence coming into being, but on the other hand it might take a while to sort through the technology even with the materials left by the Cybermen, but by that time it would probably take a while to ensure extra safety protocols were implemented so Judgement Day would never have taken place.

Besides, from what the Doctor could see there was no sign of the Skynet appearing since the invention of RoboCop was still there, indicating that although the technology had been expanded upon since they got hold of the remains of the Cybermen after the invasion aided by Tobias Vaughn, the microchip technology was still safe.

After he spent another hour studying the scanner to check the timelines, the Doctor couldn't help but think about Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese; he hoped their relationship went on alright, and with them being together to raise their son, it would hopefully be in peace while they tried to move on from what had happened.

The Doctor thought about what he had done by deliberately allowing the Terminator to attack Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, so then they would teach John how to survive in case something like Skynet occurred; the subject of the Last Great Time War was a different one for him, and talking about the myriad of alternative timelines being created and appearing all the time was too complex, but because they knew of the danger - Rassilon, Kyle had lived in that future, and there was no doubt in the Doctor's mind even if Kyle had accepted the negation of the timeline he would still make sure John Connor was taught to protect him and to become the sort of man who would be ready to rise up.

And Sarah would likely help.

With a shrug, the Doctor switched off the scanner and went to the navigational controls and started to input coordinates. It was time to move on. There was a lot for him to do.

* * *

Until the next one...


End file.
